Elizabeth M. Norman (23 page)

But as the film went forward, Eunice Hatchitt began to notice certain inconsistencies in the script and a number of inaccuracies as well. Somewhat naive and certainly untutored in Hollywood’s ways, Hatchitt thought the film would be an accurate record of the women’s experience, but the producers and the studio, of course, had something else in mind.

S
ET IN
M
AY
1942,
So Proudly We Hail
opens on a ship returning home from the Philippines and carrying a group of army nurses who have survived the battles of Bataan and Corregidor. One of the women, Lieutenant “Davey” Davidson (played by Claudette Colbert), sits in a deck chair, apparently in some kind of a stupor. In an attempt to discover the cause of Davey’s detachment, a doctor begins to interview her fellow nurses to find out what happened to the group. The women describe their lives in the Bataan jungle—working under the bombs, the long hours, the lack of supplies, the advancing enemy, and so on. Naturally,
they find the time to pursue the handsome officers in their midst, and the audience learns that Davey had a romance with Lieutenant John Sommers (George Reeves). As Davey and the other nurses prepare to evacuate Bataan, Sommers is wounded in the leg and Davey assists in the operation, then drags him into a rowboat bound for Corregidor, a woman saving her man from the enemy, a thin reversal that does little to redeem the film’s formula characterizations. (Earlier in the movie, for example, the nurses appear trapped by a squad of Japanese infantry until one of them, Olivia Darcey [Veronica Lake], lets down her gorgeous blond hair and walks seductively toward the leering Japanese soldiers, then pulls the pin on a grenade she has secreted in her bosom and blows herself and the enemy to bits.) Meanwhile, Captain “Ma” McGregor (Mary Servoss), the nurses’ dauntless leader, is almost masculine in her demeanor as a commanding officer—stalwart, that is, until her son becomes wounded and is carried to the hospital. There, as he is dying, she comes to his side, the weeping, grief-stricken mother. Finally, on Corregidor, Davey marries Lieutenant Sommers, with Ma McGregor’s blessing, before he is sent on a secret mission to find some stores of quinine. While he is away Davey is ordered off the Rock to Australia, but she refuses to leave until she knows whether her husband has survived. When she learns he has been declared missing in action, she collapses and falls into a comalike state. The film ends on board the ship steaming for home, with the doctor explaining to Davey’s comrades that her stupor is a manifestation of her fear and grief. The doctor then reads aloud one of Sommers’s last letters to Davey, a missive that emphasizes the importance of their cause and reassures his wife that one day they again will be together. Davey suddenly regains her senses and with her sister nurses at her side, determines to carry on the fight.

So Proudly We Hail
was one of the biggest moneymakers of 1943, in part because the movie was advertised as a “realistic” picture of the fighting on Bataan and Corregidor and an accurate portrayal of women at war. Like every war movie ever made, the film not only reflected reigning cultural views, it reverted to clichés and types. It was storytelling, not history, and as such missed the point.

The women on Bataan and Corregidor simply did what they had to do, no more and no less than the men who fought alongside them. They were not heroes, but their service was considered extraordinary because no one expected them to do what they did. They had not been trained for war as the men had; they were not equipped, in any sense, to take
part in battle. It would have been far more accurate to have portrayed them simply as an eclectic assemblage of anonymous citizen-soldiers, ordinary people called upon to perform extraordinary acts.

But life and art are always different, always properly out of sync. And that is why filmmakers wink, or at least look a bit abashed, when they insist that their dramas, their stories, are “realistic.” What is more, no one could have told the real story of Bataan—the government likely would not have allowed it—the story of the filth, the hunger, the bungling and the abandonment that took place in the Philippines. To tell the truth would have been to reveal the shameless circumstances that led to the loss of Bataan and Corregidor in the first place, to expose the inadequate supplies, the sloppy military planning and the rank political decisions that led to the Bataan Death March and the capture of 72,000 allied combat troops and seventy-seven American military women.

Still, Eunice Hatchitt, reading the script and looking for “the truth,” was upset. When she came to the pages where the character of Olivia Darcey kills herself and her Japanese pursuers with a grenade tucked in her cleavage, Hatchitt popped. The nurses had treated their Japanese prisoners with care and compassion, not the racist rage that drove the Darcey character to avenge her lover in an erotic suicide.

Hatchitt called Blanchfield. She told the colonel that she wanted to be reassigned, but Blanchfield refused and chided the nurse for being so thin-skinned. The director and scriptwriter were allowed some license with the story, Blanchfield said, especially if their movie helped morale and recruitment. Hatchitt argued that, as she saw it, the movie’s cardboard characters would disaffect recruits, not attract them. But Blanchfield had heard enough. She ended the conversation by reminding the young nurse that she was under orders. Did she understand? She was to stay at her post and complete the assignment.

Now, with almost every scene, Hatchitt became more and more irritable and provoked. She hated the lovemaking in the foxholes and was embarrassed when the character of the senior nurse begs her commanding officer to evacuate the women off Bataan.

During the filming, two of the movie’s stars tried to sit Hatchitt down and soothe her ire. Claudette Colbert and Paulette Goddard often invited the nurse to their homes and asked her to tell them what the war was “really like.” The nurse was flattered and a little thrilled to be in such company, but she continued to protest the liberties that both the director and screenwriter were still taking.

So Proudly We Hail
opened in June 1943 at the industry’s most prestigious
venue, Radio City Music Hall in New York. The critics loved it; the audience came in droves, day after day, week after week.

The nurses, however, were embarrassed. They hated the movie—it trivialized their experience, they said, their sacrifice, their ordeal—and they blamed Eunice Hatchitt for everything. She had betrayed them, they said, and it took years, in some cases decades, before they forgave her.
³¹

Chapter 10

In Enemy Hands

T
HE FIRST
WAVE
of Japanese came ashore around midnight. By ten the next morning the allies had suffered eight hundred killed and a thousand wounded. The casualties crowded the hospital laterals in Malinta Tunnel. Wainwright, looking at the wounded and the women tending them, seemed ready to act.

I went over our position in my mind—shaken troops, beach defenses literally pulverized … new and uncontested landings … But it was the terror that is vested in a tank that was the deciding factor. I thought of the havoc that even one of these could wreak if it nosed into the tunnel, where lay our helpless wounded and their brave nurses.
¹

According to official records and reports, Wainwright “decided” to surrender Corregidor at 10:00
A.M
. on the morning of May 6, but clearly the general knew much earlier that he was going to haul down the flag. At some point during the night, he must have told his senior aides and commanders, including those in the medical corps, that he was going to surrender at midmorning, because sometime before dawn, Maude Davison “routed” her nurses out of bed, as one of them put it, to discuss their imminent capture.
²

Summoned to the hospital mess hall, the fifty-four army nurses looked dazed as they sat down quietly on the long benches and folded their hands on the tables in front of them. Davison looked at the faces—thin, pale, dark circles under their eyes. Now and then in the dank tunnel air, someone would cough. The senior nurse had no book to follow
on this one, no official protocol. Her charges had been the first group of military women in combat, and now they were about to become among the first to fall into enemy hands.
³

Order number one: at all times they were to wear their khaki uniforms and carry their gas masks. Order number two: they were to make sure their Red Cross armbands were always on their sleeve, this in the hope that the Japanese would respect the universal symbol for noncombatants. Finally: they were to stay in the sleeping lateral or, if on duty, in the ward. To wander alone in another lateral would surely invite trouble, she said.

The women looked at their captain, then at one another.

“The bombing had stopped and it was quiet and there was a feeling—well, it’s hard to say what the feeling was,” said Hattie Brantley. “We were concerned and worried—we had all heard of the Rape of Nanking—but we thought maybe [with the fighting over] things would be for the better.”
⁴

Hope, of course, is often just a mask.

“I was scared spitless,” said Inez McDonald. “The night before surrender I went to sleep in another bed way in the back of our lateral, and I slept with my helmet on my head.”
⁵

No one was sure what to expect. Would the Japanese shock troops shoot their way into the tunnel? Or would they, as Wainwright feared, point their flamethrowers down the laterals and turn the tunnels into an inferno? Pharmacist’s Mate Ernest J. Irwin thought “the Japs would either gas us in the tunnel or march us out and shoot us.”
⁶
One wounded officer handed a nurse his West Point class ring and asked her to make sure the keepsake got home to his wife and daughter.

At 10:00
A.M
. the nurses were officially informed that Wainwright planned to go on tunnel radio and in an open broadcast, tell the enemy he was ready to surrender.

When “we heard the surrender broadcast,” said Bertha “Charlie” Dworsky, “I don’t think there was a dry eye in the place.”

An optimist, Dworsky had convinced herself that the enemy would treat the women decently, perhaps even send them home.

“We always felt we were noncombatants, according to the Geneva Convention. If we were captured, we would be put on a Red Cross boat and sent away,” she said. “Then the war would be over for us.”
⁷

The others, less sanguine about their prospects, set about hiding their valuables. One woman slipped her rings onto a safety pin, then secured the pin far down inside her blouse so that no one could see its outline.
Another nurse made a huge curl on the top of her head and placed her jewelry inside her hair. A third buried her keepsakes under her pillow.

Angry, almost defiant in the face of the enemy, Eleanor Garen scratched the lens of her camera with a needle, rendering it useless.

“I wasn’t defeated,” she later told a friend. “I was captured. I didn’t surrender—others surrendered me!”
⁸

Someone on the operating room staff opened a bottle of liquor. Soon the doctors and nurses were offering toasts to one another and their families back home.

General Wainwright, meanwhile, had dispatched one of his subordinates to meet the Japanese. He was eager to stop the shooting and halt the advance of the enemy tanks. Then he sent a message to the president.

With broken heart and head bowed in sadness, but not in shame, I report to Your Excellency that today I must arrange terms for the surrender of the fortified islands of Manila Bay. If you agree, Mr. President, please say to the nation that my troops and I have accomplished all that is humanly possible and that we have upheld the best traditions of the United States and its Army. May God bless and preserve you and guide you and the nation in the effort to ultimate victory. With profound regret and with continued pride in my gallant troops I go to meet the Japanese commander. Good-by, Mr. President.
⁹

At noon, while a bugler played “Taps,” two American officers lowered the Stars and Stripes from the pole outside Malinta Tunnel and in its place raised a white bedsheet. One of the officers cut a small piece of the flag as a memento, then he set the rest of the Red, White and Blue on fire.

Underground the women prepared their remembrance. They ripped a large square of cloth from a rough muslin bedsheet and, at the top, wrote the heading, “Members of the Army Nurse Corps and Civilian Women who were in Malinta Tunnel when Corregidor fell.” Underneath in three columns the sixty-nine women signed their names.
¹⁰

“We wanted to leave a record in case we disappeared,” said Cassie. “We had no idea what was going to happen to us.”
¹¹

Finally, around 2:00
P.M
. Wainwright came face-to-face with his enemy. He met with the Japanese commander of the invasion force and was told that he would be ferried across the bay to Bataan to meet with Homma and arrange (accept unconditionally, the Japanese told him) the terms of the surrender.

As soon as Wainwright left, the Japanese quickly moved to assume control of Malinta Tunnel.